Windows look and feel is not very configurable, true, but:
No but. Thousands of Mac users use an interface that is almost completely non-configurable ("You vill think outside the box in the vay ve tell you to, dammit!") but you don't hear them complaining. Maybe there's a message for us all in that...:-(
Nor do I. I haven't been able to find out what Linus' patches are supposed to fix, but he should at least be taken seriously. More than I, in any case. I have to admit I'm one of those long-time Gnome users who bitch and moan when the developers come up with some new asshattery, but don't do anything about it...:-|
The difference is that, as a distributor, Pat V has no need to go to all that (fairly extensive) trouble of building and maintaining Gnome, since Dropline packages it for Slackware so well.
In any case, though, Linus does have a point. Although I've been a big fan of Gnome since ~1997, the number of idiocies the developers have come up with over the years beggars belief. Every so often it all gets too much for me, and I find myself yet again trying to get to like KDE. Not that KDE is non-functional (in many ways it has a superior record for stability), I just find it too much.
If i try a newer kernel, the ati drivers won't compile, if i try an older kernelversion
my wlan isn't properly supported, so i'm stuck at 2.6.18.1, and i want xen to run on
my laptop, which uses 2.6.17.x i think so i'm out ofluck...
What a tale of woe. I've heard ATI's Linux support can be a bit problematic...
When I first started playing with Linux some 14 years ago, I had battle after battle getting X11 to run on various graphics cards. Then I bought my first nVidia card (a Riva TNT) and it worked so well, I've never considered getting a GPU from anyone else.
Although I've upgraded my graphics cards from time to time, it has never been because they've gone wrong. The first one I bought still works, although it is occupying space in a very full box of bits...
I've run that way for over 15 years now (damn, I'm getting old) and never once deleted something by mistake.
I guess I must be much older than you are.;-) If you never do anything by mistake, you're missing a lot of learning opportunities.
Besides, making a grand fuckup of someone's system is a good way to feel REALLY old very quickly. As they say, good judgement comes from experience. And most experience comes from bad judgement.
...which brings me back to the grandparent post: you would think Microsoft would come up with a more useful dialogue box or just get rid of most of them altogether.
A few weeks ago my old Dad had one of those delightful messages on his machine: "An unrecoverable error has occurred, yada yada... [OK].
As he quite rightly pointed out, "No it isn't fucking OK. What am I supposed to do now?".
When will the nation learn that we cannot abide with marketing in this post-9/11 world?
What does 9/11 have to do with the price of fish? For that matter, what was so special about 9/11?
I know the politicians of our day like to beat up the terrorism issue as if it was something new, despite the fact that it has literally thousands of years of history, but those same politicians are the first to use the most scurrilous tactics the marketroids can devise.
The point I was making about Indian call centres has nothing to do with the standard of their English. On the contrary, it would probably be fair to say that, in general, the accuracy of their language (regardless of accent) is at least equivalent to that of the average Slashdotter. I'll leave you to construe what you will from that...:-D
The point I was making was that the scripted responses they are allowed (or equipped) to proffer seem to be specifically designed to achieve nothing other than to provide a buzz-bar between the customer and the company.
Seems to me that those Indian call centres are there to serve no other purpose than to keep the customer off the company's back. It would be more honest if they were simply to say "caveat emptor - no warranty". That's what they mean, anyway.
My worst experience is with three.com, but that, I guess, is another story altogether...
Sounds a bit like Windows 95, which almost everybody despised, being closely followed by Windows 98, which everybody seems to have hated. Followed by 2000 (somewhat less hated) and XP which is only loathed.
Maybe in 2 years time they'll come up with something people only dislike...;-)
I went and bought the firewire cable because for some reason my iPod Mini wasn't reliable with my USB2.0 ports under Linux. It kept disconnecting during data transfers, and I never did find out why. (I never had this problem with any other hardware.) Since I had the firewire port on the back of my Audigy soundcard, it sort of made sense to try it, and it has been 100% reliable.
On a side note, I'm betting we'll see bluetooth enabled iPods before too long.
I wouldn't count on it. Apple isn't above reducing functionality when it suits them. I'm thinking of the current Nano crop which doesn't even support firewire...
I use gtkpod with my iPod. The interface is similar enough to iTunes to make no difference (except for being gtk of course) and it's preferable to having to dual-boot. Of course, it doesn't cooperate with Apple's DRMware they try to sell us, but that's fine by me since I prefer to encode my own mp3s from CD.
Before Microsoft bought it, the spelling was HoTMaiL (HTML + 'o' and 'ai').
...and IIRC it was Rocketmail before that. But be that as it may, does anyone still use Hotmail? I was under the impression that most mail servers were set to reject mail with a hotmail FROM header. At least, mine still is.;-)
You can. And then you can pay $300 again in six months when the flimsy POS dies and needs to be replaced.
This is true. I once made that mistake when I was short of cash and got bitten. The CPU was OK but it was sitting on one of those all-in-one motherboards in an inadequately cooled case. Needless to say, the mobo failed a day after the warranty expired, leaving me to start again from scratch.
Now I don't trust anyone else to build my desktop computers at all. It's cheaper in the long run to buy a well-designed case and put in decent components when you feel the need to upgrade rather than when they fail catastrophically.
... is leave dozens of wireless routers lying around, switched on, broadcasting trivially encrypted 'networks' to the surroundings - except not have anything connected to them. No internet, no servers, no ethernet cable, nothing.
Damn, I just got rid of a couple of wireless access points, and I never thought of that. It might have been kind of fun to browse through the syslogs on those to see who is banging their heads against a brick wall...
I've wondered about Skype for a while since I discovered that the Skype Linux client doesn't really close when you exit the program. It leaves a process there which you have to kill before the program will restart properly again. If they were doing anything underhand with that orphaned process, I guess it was pretty dumb to make its presence that obvious, but given the general calibre of their programming (at least wrt the Linux client), it would hardly be surprising.
Since my iPod has never, ever in its life seen any files with DRM, it can't be part of any "DRM scheme"
Same here. Which is why it would be nice to just drag my mp3 library on to the iPod without messing around with interfaces such as gtkpod or iTunes.
Yes, I have heard of Rockbox and Linux for iPod (Q: can you do a simple drag/drop with those?), but have been too busy using the gadget to have time to mess with its operating system.
One thing I am curious about, and that is how well they fare as far as battery use is concerned. I gather that Apple have gone to some trouble to optimise power usage with spinning up/down the hard drives, but I haven't seen any stats showing how usage with Rockbox or Linux compares,
Slashdot Mirror
Windows look and feel is not very configurable, true, but:
:-(
No but. Thousands of Mac users use an interface that is almost completely non-configurable ("You vill think outside the box in the vay ve tell you to, dammit!") but you don't hear them complaining. Maybe there's a message for us all in that...
I don't see anything wrong here.
:-|
Nor do I. I haven't been able to find out what Linus' patches are supposed to fix, but he should at least be taken seriously. More than I, in any case. I have to admit I'm one of those long-time Gnome users who bitch and moan when the developers come up with some new asshattery, but don't do anything about it...
The difference is that, as a distributor, Pat V has no need to go to all that (fairly extensive) trouble of building and maintaining Gnome, since Dropline packages it for Slackware so well.
In any case, though, Linus does have a point. Although I've been a big fan of Gnome since ~1997, the number of idiocies the developers have come up with over the years beggars belief. Every so often it all gets too much for me, and I find myself yet again trying to get to like KDE. Not that KDE is non-functional (in many ways it has a superior record for stability), I just find it too much.
Heh - best post of the week, and you had to do it anonymously...
If i try a newer kernel, the ati drivers won't compile, if i try an older kernelversion my wlan isn't properly supported, so i'm stuck at 2.6.18.1, and i want xen to run on my laptop, which uses 2.6.17.x i think so i'm out ofluck...
What a tale of woe. I've heard ATI's Linux support can be a bit problematic...
When I first started playing with Linux some 14 years ago, I had battle after battle getting X11 to run on various graphics cards. Then I bought my first nVidia card (a Riva TNT) and it worked so well, I've never considered getting a GPU from anyone else.
Although I've upgraded my graphics cards from time to time, it has never been because they've gone wrong. The first one I bought still works, although it is occupying space in a very full box of bits...
I've run that way for over 15 years now (damn, I'm getting old) and never once deleted something by mistake.
;-) If you never do anything by mistake, you're missing a lot of learning opportunities.
I guess I must be much older than you are.
Besides, making a grand fuckup of someone's system is a good way to feel REALLY old very quickly. As they say, good judgement comes from experience. And most experience comes from bad judgement.
...which brings me back to the grandparent post: you would think Microsoft would come up with a more useful dialogue box or just get rid of most of them altogether.
A few weeks ago my old Dad had one of those delightful messages on his machine: "An unrecoverable error has occurred, yada yada... [OK].
As he quite rightly pointed out, "No it isn't fucking OK. What am I supposed to do now?".
When will the nation learn that we cannot abide with marketing in this post-9/11 world?
What does 9/11 have to do with the price of fish? For that matter, what was so special about 9/11?
I know the politicians of our day like to beat up the terrorism issue as if it was something new, despite the fact that it has literally thousands of years of history, but those same politicians are the first to use the most scurrilous tactics the marketroids can devise.
The point I was making about Indian call centres has nothing to do with the standard of their English. On the contrary, it would probably be fair to say that, in general, the accuracy of their language (regardless of accent) is at least equivalent to that of the average Slashdotter. I'll leave you to construe what you will from that... :-D
The point I was making was that the scripted responses they are allowed (or equipped) to proffer seem to be specifically designed to achieve nothing other than to provide a buzz-bar between the customer and the company.
Seems to me that those Indian call centres are there to serve no other purpose than to keep the customer off the company's back. It would be more honest if they were simply to say "caveat emptor - no warranty". That's what they mean, anyway.
My worst experience is with three.com, but that, I guess, is another story altogether...
Sounds a bit like Windows 95, which almost everybody despised, being closely followed by Windows 98, which everybody seems to have hated. Followed by 2000 (somewhat less hated) and XP which is only loathed.
;-)
Maybe in 2 years time they'll come up with something people only dislike...
It should be changed from "Windows" to "Doors".
Why not simply "Gates"?
I went and bought the firewire cable because for some reason my iPod Mini wasn't reliable with my USB2.0 ports under Linux. It kept disconnecting during data transfers, and I never did find out why. (I never had this problem with any other hardware.) Since I had the firewire port on the back of my Audigy soundcard, it sort of made sense to try it, and it has been 100% reliable.
On a side note, I'm betting we'll see bluetooth enabled iPods before too long.
I wouldn't count on it. Apple isn't above reducing functionality when it suits them. I'm thinking of the current Nano crop which doesn't even support firewire...
I use gtkpod with my iPod. The interface is similar enough to iTunes to make no difference (except for being gtk of course) and it's preferable to having to dual-boot. Of course, it doesn't cooperate with Apple's DRMware they try to sell us, but that's fine by me since I prefer to encode my own mp3s from CD.
...and IIRC it was Rocketmail before that.
Seems I recalled wrongly. Sorry.
Before Microsoft bought it, the spelling was HoTMaiL (HTML + 'o' and 'ai').
;-)
...and IIRC it was Rocketmail before that. But be that as it may, does anyone still use Hotmail? I was under the impression that most mail servers were set to reject mail with a hotmail FROM header. At least, mine still is.
From the submission... 'It's like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall,' said the leader of the project, Professor John-Dylan Haynes .
Now why does that remind me of the old joke about how to make a blonde's eyes light up?
[You shine a torch in her ears.]
You can. And then you can pay $300 again in six months when the flimsy POS dies and needs to be replaced.
This is true. I once made that mistake when I was short of cash and got bitten. The CPU was OK but it was sitting on one of those all-in-one motherboards in an inadequately cooled case. Needless to say, the mobo failed a day after the warranty expired, leaving me to start again from scratch.
Now I don't trust anyone else to build my desktop computers at all. It's cheaper in the long run to buy a well-designed case and put in decent components when you feel the need to upgrade rather than when they fail catastrophically.
... is leave dozens of wireless routers lying around, switched on, broadcasting trivially encrypted 'networks' to the surroundings - except not have anything connected to them. No internet, no servers, no ethernet cable, nothing.
Damn, I just got rid of a couple of wireless access points, and I never thought of that. It might have been kind of fun to browse through the syslogs on those to see who is banging their heads against a brick wall...
As I suppose is typical for Slashdot, the submission and subsequent posts should be "Score:-1 Irrelevant".
What nobody seems to have questioned is why any Mac or OS user would want Vista in the first place, let alone consider paying for it.
Move along, nothing to see here...
Huh? It doesn't do that on my box. When I kill it, it's gone.
Curious. What flavour of Linux are you running? This feature isn't unknown - it has been mentioned on the Skype forums.
I've wondered about Skype for a while since I discovered that the Skype Linux client doesn't really close when you exit the program. It leaves a process there which you have to kill before the program will restart properly again. If they were doing anything underhand with that orphaned process, I guess it was pretty dumb to make its presence that obvious, but given the general calibre of their programming (at least wrt the Linux client), it would hardly be surprising.
Damn, I've worn out yet another tinfoil hat...
Since my iPod has never, ever in its life seen any files with DRM, it can't be part of any "DRM scheme"
Same here. Which is why it would be nice to just drag my mp3 library on to the iPod without messing around with interfaces such as gtkpod or iTunes.
Yes, I have heard of Rockbox and Linux for iPod (Q: can you do a simple drag/drop with those?), but have been too busy using the gadget to have time to mess with its operating system.
One thing I am curious about, and that is how well they fare as far as battery use is concerned. I gather that Apple have gone to some trouble to optimise power usage with spinning up/down the hard drives, but I haven't seen any stats showing how usage with Rockbox or Linux compares,
Dammit, warn somebody before posting a link like that, won't you? :-O